If naivety is sometimes seen as a flaw, which could testify to an excess of confidence and credulity resulting from ignorance, in fact naivety can also be perceived as an asset: reflecting freshness and candor , it would testify to the natural and gracious simplicity with which something is expressed or represented… And it would not prevent having wit either!

«What is most criminal in the world, wrote Alexandre Jardin in My three Zebras, it is the absence of naivety. It reduces the essential to minutiae and abolishes our impulses.Like this writer, many authors see naivety as a virtue. It is very frequently linked, too, to the freshness of childhood: thus, Romain Gary considered that these naivety of childhood “are perhaps the most fruitful part that life gives us and then takes us back«.

The actress Isabelle Huppert has a similar point of view: she affirmed, in the columns of Psychology magazinefrom which ‘ “to be an actress (…) emotionally and emotionally, it is to live in a world of childhood“. And she specified, then: “It takes a certain dose of candor, naivety to believe in what we do. “

The word “naivety”, etymologically, is formed from the word “naive” and the suffix “-eté” and takes its origin from the Latin “nativus”, meaning “who is born, who has a birth, a beginning, received by being born, innate; given by nature, natural“. Naivety designates, in fact, the natural and graceful simplicity with which a thing is expressed or represented.

Naivety hardly prevents you from having wit, moreover. A naive being can indeed be endowed with great intelligence: and his very simplicity sometimes testifies to this. Candid, but not stupid for all that! Showing candor, freshness of mind, also goes hand in hand with a kind of understanding and ability to be present to others, in short: a form of finesse and subtlety. Thus, as the French historian and writer Charles Pinot Duclos writes: “Do we not see people whose naivety and candor prevent justice from being done to their spirit? However naivety is only the simplest and most natural expression, the background of which can be fine and delicate.«

It is even a form of aptitude for thinking and openness expressed by a form of naivety; when, for example, one is deprived of the obligation to please or to do well. Thus, thinking of writing only for himself, Voltaire allows himself a naivety that he would not necessarily have had if he had addressed readers … And, moreover, that frees his thought: “It is true that in this volume, which I give in spite of myself, I always let see the effect that the objects I consider have had on my mind, writes Voltaire in Fragments on history. But this account that I made of these readings, with a naivety that one almost never has when writing for the public, is precisely what could be useful. Each reader is much more within reach of establishing his judgment by correcting mine; and whoever thinks does think.«

This form of innocence peculiar to naive beings would therefore be, in many respects, an asset. For the reussitepersonnelle.com website, “the greatest scientists cultivate a part of naivety, an innocence that allows them to believe in theories that have not yet been validated“. Yet, far from us of course, the idea of ​​believing that this would make stupid people out of them! And if scientists manage to keep a certain naivety, artists and storytellers also show it: “This is what allows them to see the world differently“, Again indicates the site successpersonnelle.com.  

To be naive is to keep a part of frankness, a simplicity in one’s way of being, a kind of levity. A form of purity, too: it is, for example, the ability to marvel at nothing, not to be jaded of a world, of a life in which you would think you knew and understood everything …

Naivety could even make it possible to do great things, to free oneself, to be able to create… The story of these two Guinean brothers is in this striking: in 1989, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry were just “two naive but determined young boys“, Writes author Deborah Bach. And, when they were 10 and 14 years old, they embarked on the creation of an alphabet for their mother tongue, Fulani. This Niger-Congolese language is spoken by more than six million people, over an area stretching from Senegal and Gambia to Cameroon and east of Lake Chad. Until then, it did not have a writing system.

The two brothers, locking themselves in their house, created and chose the shapes that they thought went best with the sounds, reveals the Microsoft news website. “We just wanted people to be able to write correctly in their own language, would have entrusted the two brothers. We had no idea how much work this represented!After decades of hard work, indeed, their Fulani writing system, called ADLaM, has become widely used. 

Sometimes, it is therefore starting from a certain naivety that we will really dare, and take the step! Get started. And then it is possible for us to create. However, for the author Jean Onimus, “create is a way to stay or become yourself«.